Sunday, October 11, 2015

The 34th Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, 3-11 October, 2015

Click to enlarge.

For the last time David Robinson, director of Le Giornate del Cinema
Muto since 1997, uttered the words "welcome home" in his opening speech
in Pordenone. He has steered the festival through stormy waters,
including the biggest ordeal of having to move away from Pordenone to
Sacile in 1999-2006. The financial situation has become more difficult,
yet no compromises have taken place in the artistic approach of the
ambitious festival whose mission is nothing less than rewriting film
history. A new generation of silent film aficionados is now attending Le
Giornate whose basis is sound from the viewpoint of audience
commitment. The Pordenone audience gave a warm welcome to the new
director, Jay Weissberg, who immediately started sharing
responsibilities with David.

The festival was dedicated to Jean Darling (1922-2015) who until her
death was Pordenone's resident star, the penultimate surviving member of
Our Gang. In a recently taped performance we saw and heard her singing
"Always".

The Jonathan Dennis Memorial Lecture was a tribute to Naum Kleiman from
Moscow, one of the great personalities of film culture since the 1950s.
One of Naum's mottoes: "the film begins when it ends". It then becomes a
subject for further research, debate, analysis, contemplation, even a
part of our life. For facilitating such a process Pordenone is fertile
ground. The main content of the event was a screening of Cinema: A Public Affair (DE 2015), a portrait of Naum Kleiman by Tatiana Brandrup.

THE 120TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE CINEMA. In recent years in Pordenone we
have seen marvellous programmes of restorations of difficult formats
(Parnaland, Joly-Normandin) and reconstructed programmes of early cinema
exhibitors, most prominently the multi-year Corrick Collection program
from Australia. In the same highest level of identification, restoration
and reconstruction we now saw two wonderful shows of the pioneer
exhibitor Antonio Sagarmínaga in Coleccion Sagarmínaga from
Filmoteca Española curated by Camille Blot-Wellens. It was a beautiful
way to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the cinema with classic and
less known samples from Lumière, Méliès, Warwick, Gaumont, Pathé,
Chomón, and Parnaland. From Leopoldo Fregoli, the international
superstar of quick transformations, was shown a new and complete
digitally restored set (2015 AFF/CNC). Fregoli's remaining film heritage
stems from 1897-1899 and he has been claimed to be the first film star
(but my candidate would be Georges Méliès).

THE HIDDEN BIG CENTENARY. In previous times The Birth of a Nation would
have been celebrated in a year like this; instead, there was a
counter-celebration to the groundbreaking film whose racism we condemn,
most importantly in the tribute to black artists under the title Bert
Williams and Company. There was a special resurrection event of the
first all-black American feature film Lime Kiln Club Field Day (US 1913). Uncle Tom's Cabin (US
1914) was the first mainstream American film with a black actor in a
leading role (Sam Lucas), based on the most filmed novel during the
silent era (there never was a sound version in Hollywood). Besides there
was the most prominent film adaptation (US 1928) of the novel Ramona,
"the second most important 19th century American social protest novel
after Uncle Tom's Cabin", about Ramona's love story with a Native
American in Southern California, starring Dolores Del Rio. D. W.
Griffith had played the Native American in a stage production, and he
had also directed a pro-Indian adaptation of the novel, starring Mary
Pickford.

CHANGING THE WORLD was another hidden theme of the festival. Uncle Tom's
Cabin belongs to the novels that have changed history. Another great
tale which survived on Leo Tolstoy's shortlist after his fundamentalist
"What Is Art" conversion was Les Misérables seen as the Pordenone
centerpiece in its French 1926 film adaptation directed by Henri
Fescourt in a majestic 6½ h version which I know well in glorious black
and white and look forward to see another time in its newly restored
colour edition. Revolutionary scenes were seen not only in it and in
Sergei Eisenstein's October (SU 1928) but also in William Wauer's amazing Der Tunnel (DE 1915), one of the discoveries of the festival, and also in Douglas Fairbanks's first period feature film, The Mark of Zorro
(US 1920), an incitement to revolt against tyranny. Social
consciousness was also on display in Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi's special
programme Children at Work where especially Jeux d'enfants
(FR 1913, D: Henri Fescourt, supv: Louis Feuillade) resonated strongly,
also with Les Misérables with its Cosette theme. Life has changed since
in Europe and North America, but not for the majority of the people of
the world.

THE GREATEST TALES OF MANKIND: to those quoted above let's also add the epic legends of the Troyan war revived in Manfred Noa's Helena - der Untergang Trojas I-II
(DE 1924) with a panache comparable with Lang and Murnau and with a
sense of gravity stemming from the unhealed pain from the recent WWI.
And Sherlock Holmes (US 1916, starring William Gillette), an
impressive record of a legendary interpretation which even influenced
Arthur Conan Doyle himself.

IL CENTENARIO DELLA GRANDE GUERRA is a multi-year theme in Pordenone. This time I saw remarkable non-fiction films by Luca Comerio from 1916-1917, interesting for a Finnish viewer as records of winter war. Those films happened also to confirm that even in Maciste alpino (IT
1916) the Alpine war footage has a partly documentary quality. Year by
year it gets clearer that WWI was the tragic turning-point in the silent
era of the cinema, dividing it into la Belle Époque, the war years, and
the post-traumatic shell shock period. (I would count even The Phantom of the Opera, US 1925, seen as a Photoplay film concert as the closing gala and starring Lon Chaney as the horribly disfigured Erik, as a shell shock film, using the term of Anton Kaes). Even Zane Grey was affected: The Call of the Canyon
(US 1923, the remaining fragments of whose film adaptation were seen
here) is the story of the rehabilitation in the West of a deeply
disturbed war veteran.

THE CANON REVISITED 7 was again the backbone of the week. These are films that deserve to be revisited as often as possible. Det hemmelighedsfulde X (DK 1914) confirmed that Benjamin Christensen was a master of visual storytelling ahead of his time. Marcel L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine (FR 1924) in its new Lobster colour restoration made the best sense ever for me of this visionary constructivist Gesamtkunstwerk. The Mark of Zorro (US
1920, a Douglas Fairbanks vehicle directed by Fred Niblo) I had never
seen before. Engrossing. (Also screened during the festival were Victor
Fleming's brilliant Fairbanks vehicles When the Clouds Roll By and The
Mollycoddle which I skipped this time. Still fresh in memory was also
last year's restoration of the exhilarating The Good Bad Man, directed
by Allan Dwan and shot by Victor Fleming). Sergei Eisenstein's October
(SU 1928) can inspire many thoughts; about the tragedy of history,
certainly, but also about the new concept of the time and space
continuum in the centenary year of the general theory of relativity;
Einstein and Eisenstein had something in common. Ernst Lubitsch's Die Puppe (DE 1919), a humoristic fantasy in the spirit of E. T. A. Hoffmann, I did not see this time. Graham Cutts's The Rat
(GB 1925) was a new discovery for me, starring the androgynous Ivor
Novello, and proving that Hitchcock still had a lot to learn from his
mentor, including in the approach to a crucial rape / murder scene.

VICTOR FLEMING: I skipped familiar titles such as Mantrap and was grateful to see the tragic Zane Grey film adaptation To the Last Man (1923)
starring Lois Wilson and Richard Dix and based on a true story of
carnage in old Arizona, with James Wong Howe catching the sublime of the
landscape. The passion between Gary Cooper and Lupe Velez in Wolf Song
(1929), about the coming of age of a mountain man through love, is so
convincing that it feels like a personal confession by the director.

RUSSIAN LAUGHTER: delightful discoveries were on display again in this
series. The selections also made us rethink our received notions on
Soviet culture. Can't You Just Leave Me Out? (1932, Viktor Shestakov) was amazingly revealing about the conditions of life in "real existing socialism". The State Official (1931)
was an exercise in grotesque and eccentric satire on contemporary (not
Czarist) bureaucracy by a future canonical Stalinian director, Ivan
Pyriev. Aleksei Popov's Three Friends and an Invention (1928) is simply delightful in its sense of freedom (and was a favourite of Henry Miller's). As is the obscure A Bell-Ringer's Film Career (1927, Nikolai Verkhovskii), a meta-filmic student film parody which remains fresh and funny today.

BEGINNINGS OF THE WESTERN is a new series in which I was happy to see
early films by G. M. Anderson, Allan Dwan, Thomas H. Ince, and Francis
Ford. There was a focus on Indian pictures (remarkable: The Post Telegrapher,
1912, directed either by Thomas H. Ince or Francis Ford) and strong
Western women (also a specialty of Zane Grey's). I do hope that this
series will be continued. Since reading William K. Everson's book on the
western a long time ago I have been looking forward to see as many of
these early films as possible.

LIVE FILM MUSIC has never been better in Pordenone, thanks to Neil
Brand, Frank Bockius, Günter A. Buchwald, Philip C. Carli, Mauro
Colombis, Antonio Coppola, Mark Fitz-Gerald, Stephen Horne, Ian
Mistrorigo, Maud Nelissen, José Maria Serralde Ruiz, Donald Sosin, John
Sweeney, Roman Todesco, and Daan Van Den Hurk, as well as special
orchestras. There was a new level of richness in the musical
accomplishment - or this was the year when I realized it. Special
musical delights included the charming Tonbilder show (DE 1907-1909), Antonio Coppola's original humoristic score to Ernst Lubitsch's Romeo und Julia im Schnee (DE 1920) played by Octuor de France, and a benshi performance of a new restoration of Daisuke Ito's Chuji tabinikki (JP 1927) by Ichiro Kataoka and the Otowaza ensemble.

Much I missed. Not to be forgotten: the continuing excellence of
the program notes in the catalog and the high quality of the
translations.

Jazz Record of the Week 32/2016

Jazz Record of the Week 25/2016

Jazz Record of the Week 24/2016

Sonny Rollins: A Night at the Village Vanguard (1957, 2 cd reissue 2016)

Jazz Record of the Week 23/2016

Charlie Mingus: Blues & Roots

Jazz Record of the Week 22/2016

Mal Waldron: Moods

Jazz Record of the Week 21/2016

Django Bates: Belovèd Bird

Jazz Record of the Week 20/2016

Jacques Loussier Trio: The Original Play Bach Vols. 1 & 2

Jazz Record of the Week 19/2016

Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges: Side by Side

Jazz Record of the Week 18/2016

Ray Charles: Genius+Soul=Jazz. Complete 1956-1960 Sessions with Quincy Jones (Genius+Soul=Jazz, The Genius of Ray Charles, The Genius Hits the Road, and from The Great Ray Charles and The Genius After Hours)

About Me

Antti Alanen (born 1955) is Film Programmer at National Audiovisual Institute (Finland), which runs the Cinema Orion in Helsinki. This diary is an irregular notebook of rough notes on films and occasional film-related experiences. Early notes 1963-1970: see January 1971. This blog ran out of labels in October 2009. antti.alanen at gmail.com